The
importance of stupidity in scientific research
By Martin A. Schwartz
Department of Microbiology, UVA Health System, University of
Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22908, USA
I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many
years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although
in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard
Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization.
At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To
my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a
couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.
I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent
career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it;
sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It’s just that
I’ve gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new
opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn’t know what to do without that feeling.
I even think it’s supposed to be this way. Let me explain. For almost all of
us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that
we were good at it. That can’t be the only reason – fascination with understanding
the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter
into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing
well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those
answers, you do well and get to feel smart. A Ph.D., in which you have to do a
research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task.
How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant
discoveries; designand interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were
absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or,
failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat
interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered
the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I
needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years
later) told me he didn’t know how to solve the problem I was having in his
area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about
1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn’t have the
answer, nobody did. That’s when it hit me: nobody did. That’s why it was a
research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once
I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn’t really
very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the
scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical
purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was
liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is
to muddle through as best we can. I’d like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs
often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don’t think students are
made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is
to do important research. It’s a lot harder than taking even very demanding
courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown.
We just don’t know what we’re doing. We can’t be sure whether we’re asking the
right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the
result.
Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants
and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research
is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national
policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty. Second, we
don’t do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively
stupid – that is, if we don’t feel stupid it means we’re not really trying. I’m
not talking about ‘relative stupidity’, in which the other students in the
class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you
don’t. I’m also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas
that don’t match their talents. Science involves confronting our ‘absolute
stupidity’. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our
efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the
right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the
answers wrong or gives up and says, ‘I don’t know’. The point of the exam isn’t
to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it’s the faculty
who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student’s weaknesses, partly
to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the
student’s knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to
take on a research project. Productive stupidity means being ignorant by
choice.
Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward
position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that
it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly
fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult
for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt,
reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think
scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from
learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The
more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the
unknown and the more likely we are to make big
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